... in hindsight, actually, she probably should have been asking different questions.

Uh.

She's not sure she really wants to talk to more people, but that man is wearing a uniform, and that means this is probably official, and that means there are rules and she just has to figure out what they are really quickly.

"What do I need to do to get a basic income?" she asks, ignoring the teacher's distopia question. "And, actually, what is a basic income?"

"You need to let me scan 10 fingerprints and both eyes, and to get that put into a database. Usually, someone brings their baby in and tell us to set up a basic income account for their baby, and they don't need the prints and eyes, but for anyone else to get one we need their fingerprints and eyes. A basic income is money that every single person gets paid every month without exception, and you can spend it for anything."

... huh. Sort of like an allowance. She can't think of anything she's read where they both have money, and give it to everyone.

"How do you know where to send it? Like, if I finished learning about statistics and decided to move somewhere else?" she asks.

"It gets sent to an account number, with a passowrd, that you also get. You can use money from that account anywhere in the world."

She nods. She'll let herself be fingerprinted and retina scanned.

"How much is it?" she asks, suddenly thinking about how much time her parent has to put into their work. "In terms of ... whether I will need to get a job, or live with someone," she clarifies. "I don't know how much things cost here."

The man behind the counter gets 2 square sensors, and what looks like a camera on a stick, and asks Emily to place both hands onto the sensors and stare into the camera to get fingerprinted and scanned.

"You won't need a job or live with anyone else. I don't think things are too expensive, here; it's mostly better housing and pricy hobbies like traveling everywhere that people spend their money on."

Emily considers this.

If everybody receives this amount of money, and so nobody needs a job ... she's not sure how that works. Maybe only people who like traveling do anything?

But ... she feels more on top of things than she was a few minutes ago. Dealing with money is a real thing, a thing that she has some reference for, in a world that matches up with nothing she's familiar with.

She thinks about what she needs: to learn statistics, so that nobody will bother her; to find a place to stay; to figure out where to get food; and to figure out what happened to her, and whether she's magic, or there's a portal in the park, or anything like that.

"Alright; thank you. So what is my account number and how do I set my password?"

The man behind the counter quietly hands Emily a card. It use a special kind of effect that makes it so it can only be read when seen head-on. It has a long mixture of numbers and letters, together with another shorter string of random characters under it. The one on top looks seems like the account number, with the one below being the password.

"You set your password by first logging in, then sending a tiny bit of money to the company that handles the passwords, and then they send you a temporary link where you go in to set your password. They're called World Vault Services, or whatever. Look it up on your phone."

... right.

She mentally adds "a phone" to her list of things she needs.

She turns to the teacher. "I assume I could also look up places to live on the phone?" she asks. "If so, getting a phone and then somewhere to think for a bit sounds like a good idea."

"Yes, yes, that's almost certainly the first thing you'd want to do! Let's find a phone store, and see the options, shall we?"

The teacher looks one up on her phone, and starts leading Emily towards it. It's just a few city blocks away, so it doesn't take very long before Emily ends up outside it. It's a small store, with a wide range of models visible through the window, sorted by screen size from smaller to larger going left to right.

"Er. Probably I should have asked about actual currency amounts," she admits, peering in through the window and wondering which ones she can afford. "Do you know how much my account would have started with?"

"Phones are not particularly expensive! The first time you ever get a basic income account, you start out with 2 months' worth of income, and since you can sell shares of your basic income whenever you run out of money, you have much, much more than that available. A very nice phone costs around 40% of what your basic income earns you each month."

The prices of the phones are 4-digit numbers; some start with a 2, some start with a 4. 

... right. So 10% of one month is about 1,000, so she has 20,000 to work with. She doesn't like the sound of selling shares of her basic income — that sounds like credit cards. And the ... account officer? ... said that she would be able to live alright on her basic income, meaning that her monthly expenses for a house and food and so on are probably about 10,000. So really she has 10,000 to work with, and needs to figure out whether to spend 2,000 or 4,000 on a phone.

She wasn't expecting to need a phone, but in hindsight it's kinda obvious that something like that would be required. Moreover, she's going to need more school supplies — paper and pencil, and maybe a skirt. But she's pretty sure those cost a lot less than a phone on Earth.

And she doesn't know how much of her basic income she will be able to save each month. Either she'll be able to save a lot, and get a new phone if she wants one in a few months, or she won't be able to save much, and she should hold onto the savings she does have. So either way, she should buy a cheap phone.

She enters the store and starts looking for a phone that fits comfortably in her hand, and is on the lower end of the 2,000-to-4,000 range.

The phones are all made of different materials, coming in colors that are mostly white, black or blue. They feel very, very light, but also reassuringly durable. Thanks to the phones all coming in such a range of sizes, it doesn't take long before Emily finds one that fits her hand perfectly. It costs around 2800, being the cheapest phone in that general price range. It's basically all screen, with a very small camera on the back, but it probably just does whatever it needs to.

She hasn't really held an Earth-cellphone enough to compare their weights from memory.

She examines it, reads any information that might be written down near it, and then looks around to figure out how to make a purchase.

There's a small sheet of paper full of phone specs; it has a huge battery, a relatively high-end processor, and over 200 gigabytes of storage. Outside of that, the spec sheet has tons of unfamiliar acronyms, including information about the phone's expected lifespan and various measurements of how durable it is.

There's a man sitting behind a counter, lazily reading something on his laptop. He looks over at Emily. "Do you want to just buy your phone now, or do you want my help to find something?"

"I'd like to buy this, please," Emily asserts. She's assuming it comes with a charging cord.

The man nods at her. "Well, I have a payment sensor on the counter. Just put your phone or card on it, and it'll ask to be allowed to send the money over. And then you say yes to that." He points at a part on the counter with a decal of a weighing scale on it.

Emily frowns. "I just got my basic income, so I haven't logged in or anything," she explains. "Do I need to do that first?"

"Oh, yes. Yes, you need to do that. You know what, why don't you just log in on that phone and pay me by using it? It makes more sense, don't you think?"

Emily nods, and tries to pick her way through the phone's interface, with the account-card as a reference.

It only takes a minute or so before she manages to open the payment app, and put in her password to get access to the money in her account. Putting the phone over the payment sensor, she gets a request to send the money for buying the phone to the man, which she can simply pay just by clicking "yes" in the app.

Well, that seems straightforward! She's never had a phone before, so she's not really sure how different the interface is.

Alright. Step 1 of her master plan (such as it is) complete.

She turns to the teacher, realizes she missed a step, turns back to the shopkeeper, says "Thank you", and then turns back to the teacher.

"Could I have somewhere to think and look at places to live now?" she requests.

"Well, I'm not sure where a good place to think would be? Parks tend to be quiet enough, I'd say."

It doesn't seem to be raining, so a park is fine with her. She had been imagining, like, a conference room, but she supposes they might not really have one of those reserved for random protagonists.

"Sure, that sounds fine," she agrees.